Eros,eroticism and the pedagogical process

This essay examines the role of authenticity as it appears as a factor in Irish cultural production. Taking examples from Yeats's folklore collections, tourist marketing and beer advertisements, it suggests, using the writings of Adorno, Baudrillard and Jacob Golomb, that the trope of ‘authenticity’ persists, in variant forms, as a marker of how Irish material and textual culture ‘promotes’ itself in a post-colonial context.     

The Embodiment of War: Reflections on the Tour of Duty

This essay approaches voyeurism from the point of view of the soldier on a “tour of duty” and teases out the implicit connections between the military gaze and the tourist gaze. While in training or on the battlefield, soldiers are driven by common discourses of patriotism, masculinity and heroism. However, Brighton explains that the coherence of fighting units is also a function of R&R and leisure time—when soldiers become tourists.     

Nuclear Tourism

This essay describes a new post‐war pilgrim—the nuclear tourist who visits the sites where the first nuclear bombs were created and tested. Some such pilgrims are history enthusiasts, some are impelled by diffusely patriotic impulses, and others go to protest nuclear weapons. All go to “imagine the real”—or at least their insufficient version of it. The 50th anniversary of the first nuclear test drew thousands of these nuclear tourists to New Mexico where contesting narratives of commemoration mingled and clashed. The article explores ways in which the testing grounds in New Mexico are comparable with other sites of disaster because they resist “proper” notions of reverence.     

A hut on Holy Island: reframing northern landscape

This essay explores the evolution and significance of a shelter constructed in 2002 by the artist Sally Madge on a remote beach on Holy Island, off the north-east coast of Northumberland. In the context of a legacy of cultural interactions with and representations of this island – a popular tourist destination – the concern is with how the simple structure might be understood in terms of a potential refiguring of a heavily prefigured location, enabling an alternative, even transgressive notion of place, disturbing preconceived boundaries between artists, community, insiders and outsiders and so engendering a new way of thinking about northern peripheries. In the process the essay considers recent examples of public art; from the increasingly design-practice led, spectacular structures at Kielder Reservoir Sculpture Trail, to Charles Jencks’ monumental earth sculpture, Northumberlandia constructed out of the top-soil excavated from an open-cast coal mine at Shotton. By contrast, the specific character of the Holy Island shelter and the nature of the practices associated with it unsettle some of our assumptions about place and the rhetoric underpinning art and creativity.     

'More Than Just a Hill of Beans': Contested Landscapes in John Nichols' The Milagro Beanfield War

Abstract

The American Southwest is often considered to be a harsh and unforgiving environment, yet it remains an area where indigenous communities have lived for centuries and since being opened up as a tourist destination in the late nineteenth century has witnessed an incredible growth of major urban conurbations. It is a fragile environment coming under increasing pressure and nowhere is this more apparent than in the competition for scarce water resources. Water issues remain high on the political agenda and the threat to small scale acequia farming is under intense pressure from larger agribusiness. This essay, which adopts an ecocritical perspective, revisits John Nichols' 1974 novel The Milagro Beanfield War , analysing his literary strategies as he explores the ramifications of differing interpretations of land use on the contested landscapes of New Mexico.     

Negotiating the “Global” within the Global Playscapes of Mount Everest*

Within the anthropology of tourism, “tourist” and “local” are often used to conceptualize social relations constitutive of international tourism, where “First World” mobile subjects visit stationary “Third World” “Others.” Globalization, as both discourse and condition, is changing the contours and conceptualizations of tourist spaces. In this paper, I show how “the global” is negotiated by different subjects, and how recreational mountain climbers from Nepal negotiate their identities as “locals” as well as global, mobile, travel subjects within “the global playscapes” of Himalayan mountaineering. I suggest that the question of who can be a tourist within a globalizing world should be closely examined.     

The international field placement: a reconciliation of identity

The international field placement is a site of both identity confusion and identity development for the social work student. Aiming to develop their professional identity they are faced with a challenge: the presence of two dominant identities, the tourist identity and the student identity. Whilst the embodiment of the tourist identity has often facilitated the student’s motivation to undertake the placement experience, the student identity is what both university staff and agency field educators perceive as integral to student engagement in this remote educational setting. Social work educators perceive this identity challenge as an impediment to learning. In contrast, students report feeling that their tourist traits strengthened their personal and professional capacity, natural curiosity and ability to engage with the local community. By analysing the roles of university staff as liaison support, and field educators as agency supervisors, it is possible to explore a teaching and learning relationship that is student-centred, grounded in the immersive international experience. Through privileging the student’s voice social work educators involved with organising, supporting and supervising international field placements are able to understand the placement as a continuum of learning. On this continuum identity reconciliation is viewed as a crucial element in the development of a professional identity.     

‘A Floating Population’: The Niagara Corridor and Canadian/American Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

In both Canada and the US, Niagara Falls was famous from early on as a tourist and honeymoon destination. With the rapid settlement of the ‘northwest’ occasioned by the building of canals and railroads, the region also became a centre of commerce, transit, and industry in the years before the Civil War. The Niagara corridor held an important position on the Underground Railroad, as fugitive slaves moved up into Canada (and back). After the failed uprising of 1837, Canadian revolutionaries fled to safety in Rochester, Buffalo, and other cities south of the border. The ‘burnt over’ region of western New York spawned a variety of radical utopian communities and the first Women’s Rights convention was held in Seneca Falls in 1848. Drawing on a variety of texts, testimonials, and documents, and taking a transnational approach, ‘A Floating Population’ contends that the Niagara region was a matrix of political radicalism as flows and exchanges of people, capital, and radical ideas through and across the border contributed to an unprecedented ferment of utopian, progressive, and radical forms of thought and social experimentation. The essay considers the uniquely radical republican culture situated in the border region of the Niagara corridor, a crossroads traversed by all manner of militant insurrectionists, radicals, abolitionists, feminists, journalists, fugitives, immigrants, homesteaders, itinerant labourers and tramps, Native Americans, mystics, and tourists.     

TOURIST WORLDS: TOURIST ADVERTISING, RITUAL, AND AMERICAN CULTURE

Previous work on tourist advertising typically explains promotional imagery in terms of the economic interests of advertising or the social psychology of consumption. The symbolism and meaning of such material can also be interpreted through a cultural analysis of tourism as a secular ritual. If tourism is conceptualized as a social ritual that renews meaning and person through a structured, periodic break from everyday life, then tourist advertising becomes the cultural text that symbolically transforms ordinary places and times into extraordinary tourist worlds. In contemporary American culture, tourist advertising accomplishes this task by presenting tourist worlds as places of plentitude, nature, leisure, history, and paradise, thus transcending the earnest reality of urban, everyday life. This symbolic presentation is documented through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of verbal and visual imagery in the promotional literature of the 50 states.     

It gets better ... all in good time: messianic rhetoric and a political theology of social control

Working from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” this essay examines the recent interest in the messianic and messianicity in continental philosophy. To ground its discussion, the essay analyzes two recent cultural examples of messianic rhetoric – Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and Dan Savage’s 2010 It Gets Better Project, in order to explore hidden theological dimensions of recent cultural and political discourse in the US. The essay argues that both examples showcase a reliance on the language of the messianic promise as a means of creating a docile public focused on imagined future liberation rather than a critical confrontation of the often violent and disturbing realities of the now. At the same time that the essay problematizes messianic rhetoric’s connection to deeply entrenched narratives of “progress,” the essay also works to posit alternative visions of the messianic and to question whether it is possible to redefine the concept of messianism without relying on a narrative of progress which is outdated, irresponsible, and likely violent. In the end, the essay explores how the language of queer theory, with its resistance to traditional logics of future-oriented (re)production, might provide a useful vocabulary for such a reimagining of the messianic.     

Translating Tradition: The Poetics and Politics of Diasporic Media

This essay argues that the recent academic interest in diaspora, the media and the research that it has engendered have provided unique insights into the media’s role in the creation and maintenance of an alternative public sphere. Despite this however, the difficulties in defining ‘diaspora’ as a concept, and the attempts, by both academics and diasporic cultural elites, to propose a degree of homogeneity within diaspora communities undermines the politics that is inherent in diasporic media representation and consumption. The essay makes a plea for conceptual clarity and the recognition of power within the diaspora communities, both of which are crucial for future research in the media and diasporas.     

Melancholy Hope and Other Psychic Remainders Afterthoughts on Love the Sin

In this essay the coauthors of Love the Sin consider connections between moral and psychic ambivalence around sex and sexual pleasures; what tolerance “feels” like; and melancholia as both block to and resource for democratic social relations. In the final section of their essay, they suggest rethinking tolerance as a kind of melancholic reaction, or defense, that protects the agents of tolerance from knowing just how far short that they have fallen from their own professed commitments to being fair and doing good.     

Tagging the spectral mobility of the stateless body: Deleuze,stasis, and graffiti

Following recent work by Eleanor Kaufman, this essay reads Deleuze as a thinker of stasis and immobilization in order to think through the fantasy of the refugee as an exemplary figure of mobility. Working through Difference and Repetition, I argue that Deleuze’s understanding of space emerges from a concern with both immobility and the singular concept of temporality articulated in his concept of the “third synthesis of time.” The essay then turns to two contemporary instances of stateless people immobilized by very different forms of nation state sovereignty in Tunisia and the West Bank. I examine graffiti in both locations and develop a concept of tagging, which considers both the graffiti tag and the digital tag as intersecting technologies of distributed social networks that serve to freeze and make visible the stasis of the stateless person.     

The Passagenwerk and the place of Walter Benjamin in cultural studies: Benjamin,cultural studies,Marxist theories of art

This essay is a reflection on the circumstances that led me to a particular research project, on Cajun dance and music spaces, and also on the project's mutations through subsequent phases of development. Above all, this essay attempts to take stock of the difficulties – personal, scholarly, and theoretical – as well as the personal choices that have gone into developing an ongoing scholarly project. While I indicate the importance of the experiences of personal pleasure that originally inspired my research, I also show how the personal and the pleasurable often necessarily encounter tensions and even certain kinds of conflict when linked to a ‘disciplinary’ domain. This essay therefore traces a particular example of how ‘cultural studies travels’ both geographically within a life and disciplinarily within something that has come to be known as‘French cultural studies’.     

Tropic Knights and Hula Belles: War and Tourism in the South Pacific

Through the discussion of a collection of photographs, this paper explores aspects of the relationship between tourism and war in the Pacific islands. These unpublished photographs were taken by a US naval officer stationed on Saipan and Tinian in 1944 and 1945 and are now held in an archive which contains other material from the Pacific War. A brief history is given of the photographer’s military career and of the circumstances in which the images were taken.

The body of the paper considers the politics of representation through which military and tourist sensibilities overlap. Drawing upon the work of John Urry and Teresia Teaiwa and with close reference to the Yeagar collection I demonstrate the symbiosis between the scopophilic gaze of the first world tourist and the gaze of military surveillance. Simultaneously relying upon tourist stereotypes to distract from military violence while using military force to fulfill touristic fantasies, the Yeagar photographs exemplify the complex looking relations of the soldier‐tourist. This hybrid gaze structure offers a conceptual model for more clearly understanding the development of “militourism” in the Pacific islands during, and since, World War II.     

Bourdieu in Contention and Deliberation: Response to Lamont and Lizardo

This essay responds to Lamont’s (2011) article “How Has Bourdieu Been Good to Think With? The Case of the United States,” and Lizardo’s (2011) essay “The Three Phases of Bourdieu’s U.S. Reception,” both of which appear in this issue.     

Looking inwards,designing outwards: national identity and print advertisements of the Cyprus Tourism Organisation

National identity is a person’s identity or sense of belonging to one state. It is the sense of a nation as a cohesive whole, represented by distinctive traditions and culture. The present work examines how these traditions, culture and other elements of national identity are presented in advertisements, promoting Cyprus as a tourist destination. Print advertisements of the Cypriot Tourism Organisation were collected in an effort to investigate the way the visual identity of the island is presented through nation branding. Ninety-three print tourist ads promoting Cyprus as a tourist destination since the establishment of the CTO were analysed using content analysis and semiotic analysis. The results indicated that national identity is mostly presented through the social characteristics of the people and their daily practices.     

Brésil: Quatre siècles d'esclavage. Nouvelles questions,nouvelles recherches

This essay stresses the importance of the humoural medical tradition and its lay reiterations in popular eighteenth-century British works on slavery, abolition and illness. In particular, it examines the popular medical concept of ‘seasoning’ and how contemporaries applied it to enslaved African bodies. Seasoning became a common talking point during the British abolition debate as both sides stressed different aspects of humoural theory to make their arguments. While numerous historians have used seasoning as an analytical term to explore the impact of movement on the enslaved, this essay rehabilitates its historical medical meaning and traces how abolition politics affected that meaning.     

Chinks in the Merged Attachment: Generational Bequests to Contemporary Teenage Girls

This essay reviews Picturing the Modern Amazon, an exhibit of the representations of hypermuscular women presented at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City from March 30 to June 25, 2000. Taking a sociohistorical approach, the essay situates the museum exhibit in the context of the development of American bodybuilding. The images of the Modern Amazons are linked to the intensification of capitalism and the subsequent growth of the bodybuilding, health, and fitness industries. From this perspective, we see that the Modern Amazons face a cultural paradox, for they are both gender-bending figures of muscular excess and a mainstream form of mass production; thus, they simultaneously overturn and recuperate gender norms. This essay explores the ways in which the exhibit itself embodies contradictions. In its attempt to celebrate the subversive aspects of hyper muscular females, the show decontexualizes the Modern Amazons, removing them from their muscle-building spaces and processes and rendering them into visual commodities.